i write about film, sometimes.

Monthly Archives: May 2015

Age is only a number, right? Or is it also something that predetermines the social groups we fall into, the way we behave in public and the way we regard ourselves? Noah Baumbach’s oeuvre continues to grow, with this funny, intelligent story about a couple in their 40’s at war with time. Every now and then the dialogue can be a bit too explicit in delivering food-for-thought monologues about the themes of the story, but this is fortunately contrasted with fantastic scenes with clever use of sound design and visuals to make a comment on the world we live in: a place wrought with contradiction, born out of the pursuit for our own identities. It’ll make you think – which is the cornerstone of any great film.

Paul Thomas Anderson brings us into the paranoia-filled, drug-fuelled world of Thomas Pynchon’s 1970-something LA. Staying loyal to the novel, the film grooves left and right alongside Joaquin Phoenix, as he tries to navigate his way around the absurd and surreal to solve a mysterious disappearance. Audiences have come out of the film citing it to be slow, incomprehensible and confusing. It’s taken me a while to wrap my head around it myself, but I must say that I neither agree nor disagree. Inherent Vice is ultimately a different experience, one that acknowledges cinema and genre tropes of the past, that at the end of the day, encapsulates the bewildering disorientation of the times and it’s citizens, through it’s dialogue, cinematography and plot. Inherent Vice is hard to understand – but so is so much of the world we live in. While maybe not the most ideal way to blow off some steam, maybe all we can do is sit back, light a joint and allow ourselves to embrace what we cannot, and will never, fully understand.